fleventynine

Having fewer resources such as security engineers will not lead to better outcomes. A skeleton team with gigawatts of compute in some middle east bunker is MORE likely to unleash something poorly aligned.

I don't think society has enough power to control what billionaires spend their money on. The promise of AI is such an attractive nuisance for power seekers that trying to crack down on it will just force it underground, where it will be developed with even less care and oversight than it is now.

Our institutions aren't even able to control what dirt-poor pirates do on hardware they own. How in the heck are they going to be able to control what incomprehensibly-rich people do? They can purchase political favors from whichever nations are selling them.

Ugh, the accidental complexity of drop-frame encoding, BCD, etc... This mess will likely be with us for a long time.

The solution for this is to pay open source maintainers for their attention. If I want them to review and merge my bugfix I should attach $1000 to the PR.

Not an option for me until it supports submodules.

I typically work with commit chains of at least 5 commits in various states of code review, so I spend at least 60% of my development time editing an old commit in the middle of a rebase -i.

This machine needs better networking options to be useful, such as built-in 100Gbit QSFP28. There is not enough space between the x4 PCIe slot and the power supply for a NIC to fit, and even if there was, you'd have to cut a hole in the back of the case to get at it.

It's pretty clear to me that coding agents are a significant cause of the current glut of comp-sci graduates unable to find their first job...

I think there's room for win-win solutions here; the cost of placating the locals is a rounding error compared to the cost of these data centers.

1. Local governments can require that if the data center peak load is 1.0GW, they must provision transmission and generation capacity for the local region of 1.2GW; the extra power can be given to the neighbors at substantial discount.

2. Construct a public swimming complex nearby, heated with waste data center heat.

3. Local governments can enforce strict limits on environmental noise at the property boundary. I've personally stood right next to a 150MW-class datacenter and experienced sound levels less than traffic from a typical suburban 4-lane street; making the datacenter quieter than any other industrial use is a choice the builder can make if they have the right incentives.

Setup directional microphones around the perimeter, and fine them $25,000 per minute per dB above the agreed threshold. Distribute the fines to the neighbors. Failure to pay promptly means the sheriff shuts down the power.

All of these options are far cheaper than launching the data center into space...

I like Rust and use it full-time professionally. Unsafe is not the same as unsound. Unsound means that the unsafe code is not maintaining the aliasing invariants on references required by the language, and thus undefined behavior can leak into safe code (that is, the safe code can be miscompiled).

Known unsound code should not be merged, let alone released to production. If you have good enough tests and run them under MIRI or ASAN, maybe you can get away with it for a time, but most Rust experts would not sign-off on such a project.

If somebody put a gun to my head and told me to make the best of such a codebase, I would try to figure out how to turn off the LLVM optimizations that assume the Rust references don't alias. With these optimizations this codebase is scarier than most C or C++ code.

I don't think this does enough to address to supply-chain security concerns. Before I use a crate, I want some assurance that the transitive deps have had a proper security audit, and that I'm not a single "cargo update" away from getting malware installed in my machine.

I stopped using Facebook back in 2021 when the majority of my feed was reshared political content with 20+ comments from my friends fighting about divisive social/political issues. It wasn't fun, and it wasn't fostering community, so I left. A few years later I logged in again to see that most of my Facebook friends had also stopped engaging.

Is the RTL for the FPGA available to be tinkered with?

> Every corporate network to which I've connected worked just fine without it.

Just because it appears to be working fine doesn't mean you are in control of it. Without hardware attestation, how do you know the machines are running the software you think they are?